Amazon takes aim at PayPal with new ‘Login and Pay With Amazon’ service

You may be seeing more “Pay with Amazon” buttons around the web starting today.

Amazon announced today that it’s rolling out “Login and Pay With Amazon,” a service that allows users to log in to a service using their Amazon accounts, and then use those same accounts to pay for goods and services delivered through the site they logged into.

The company says the service streamlines the process of paying for something by providing merchants with the customer’s name, email address and zip code when a user creates a new account, while giving them access to Amazon’s payment backbone at the same time.

Amazon says it has more than 215 million active customer accounts, giving the program a broad potential reach.

Online payments are nothing new for Amazon, which has been operating its Amazon Payments service since 2007. But this new service takes that further by streamlining how users interact with e-commerce sites, which could be a major advantage in its battle with PayPal and Google for the wallets of consumers around the globe.

Amazon is second only to Apple when it comes to holding the most payment details for its users. The new service could open up new frontiers for merchants, and drive growth of Amazon’s own payment platform, especially as PayPal continues to shoot itself in the foot with aggressive fraud protections that shut down crowdfunding projects.

Check out how the service works below:

Blair Hanley Frank is GeekWire's Bay Area Correspondent. He has also worked for Macworld, PCWorld and TechHive. Follow him on Twitter @belril and email him at blair@geekwire.com.